Fighting Battle of Mammoth Lakes : Former Olympic Skier Takes on Mountainous Challenge

Andrea Mead Lawrence, the only American to win two Olympic Alpine skiing events, keeps her gold medals in a box here.

Her condominium walls contain no pictures of her race down the precipitous hills outside Oslo to win the slalom and giant slalom in 1952.

Instead, the panels are lined with Ansel Adams and Andrew Wyeth prints.

Skis Once a Month

Lawrence, who skis about once a month on 11,000-foot Mammoth Mountain in this eastern Sierra community, feels ambivalent about her Olympic triumphs.

“That was a very important thing to me,” she said in an interview recently.

“(But) there’s another part of me. There’s a great pride and a very quiet person that thinks, ‘It’s done, folks. That was 30-odd years ago. Can’t we get on about the business of doing something else?’ ”

What’s important now to the gray-haired, 53-year-old grandmother of two is protecting Mammoth Lakes.

She recently announced her candidacy for a second term on the Mono County Board of Supervisors, a job she has held since 1983.

Lawrence moved her five children to Mammoth Lakes from Malibu in 1968. She lived in three homes during the following decade, each standing on a hill overlooking a meadow that stretched for miles to the White Mountains.

While waiting six months for one of the homes to become available, the family occupied an even more spectacular log cabin without electricity or a bathroom.

Love for the Mountains

Leading visitors up a hill through snowy woods to the turn-of-the-century structure a quarter mile from the nearest home, Lawrence explained that spending her first 10 years in Vermont’s Green Mountains shaped her life.

She learned to ski, but she also developed a love for mountains.

Passing between an 1878 mining flywheel and an old miners’ cemetery, she recalled her joy at living in quiet in the Mammoth Lakes cabin without even the sound of electricity. In the cabin--calked by rope to keep out the breeze--she loved listening to wind swirl through the treetops.

At sunset she and her children drank tea on a rock behind the home and looked west to Mammoth Mountain or east to the meadow and the White Mountains.

Today she rents a one-bedroom condominium where she does most of her supervisor’s work from a desk below a Mono County relief map. Often her 15-year-old dog, Mysha, naps nearby.

Largely concerned with environmental issues, she drives her yellow, four-door subcompact throughout the region, a soft-cover Audubon Society Guide to North American Birds on the dashboard.

Lawrence became involved with politics two decades ago on the Aspen, Colo., planning commission. The experience convinced her that an involved community can “really grab its destiny if it wants.”

Shortly after she moved to Mammoth, local businessmen asked her to lead the fight against construction of eight-story condominiums on a narrow strip of land three-quarters of a mile long.

Friends of Mammoth

She agreed and her group, the Friends of Mammoth, halted the project in a case that reached the California Supreme Court.

She let the waves from that case subside before re-entering politics. In 1982, when a supervisor from Mammoth Lakes decided not to run again, she was elected to the $1,659-per-month job.

By that time Lawrence, who moved to Mammoth when her marriage to former Olympic skier David Lawrence ended, had almost finished raising her children.

“It was hard,” she said. “There was a certain amount of child support. But then it stopped. . . . I just really was struggling to exist. . . . But we did make it. I did odds and ends. I did some consulting (for a ski resort).”

The jobs enabled her two boys and three girls to finish school and begin working.

Corty Lawrence, 32, manages the sales floor of a Mammoth Lakes ski equipment store while David, 31, apprentices to a Seattle photographer.

Didi, 30, coaches skiing in Mammoth Lakes and her sister, Leslie, 29, manages a San Francisco health spa. Quentin Andrea, 25, is a laboratory technician in San Diego.

Her children all ski, but say Lawrence never pushed them.

An Olympian at 15 in 1948, she captured her gold medals four years later at 19.

First she darted down a twisting, hazardous hill, between gates formed by flag-decked poles, to win the giant slalom.

On a shorter slalom course a week later, the front of her right ski hit a pole as she started the first of two runs down the hill. She spun to the side and missed the gate.

She knew immediately, she said, that she would save time by climbing through the gate, rather than around it, before she started downhill again.

The speedy recovery helped her earn a fourth-place finish 1.2 seconds behind the leader. Lawrence remembers little about climbing the hill for the second half of the event.

‘Real Me Was Not There’

“I’m sure people were talking to me,” she said. “I was chatting away and so forth. But let me tell you the real me was not there at all. I was tucked off somewhere else.

“And when I got up on top of the course, I put on my skis and . . . separated myself a little from everybody. I needed the space. And then when I moved into the starting gate, that was it.”

Speeding down the 508-yard hill with a 42% drop, she made up the deficit and won another gold medal. The assembled press considered the comeback nearly impossible.

She earned a spot on a third Olympic team in 1956, but quit competitive skiing shortly afterward.

On the rare occasions when she skis today, veteran skiers say that she is often the best athlete on the hill.

Wearing a leather vest over blue pants and shirt on a sunny day recently, she swayed from side to side and weaved powerfully down a hill with the grace of a ballerina.

Lawrence, who uses no poles, would like to ski more but said her job prevents it.

“You work 24 hours a day on it,” she said. “You’re thinking about it all the time. That’s why my dream of dreams is to get a cabin somewhere. Where you can get off and get away. And you don’t have the phone and you can take whatever book you’re reading and just have quiet. That’s the only way you actually ever get away from it.”